Because it turns out there are more than 50 varieties of Ken dolls out there — Cali Cool Ken, Tropical Vibes Ken, Hip Hoodie Ken, and more. And now they come in a variety of skin tones and body shapes that include slim, broad and original.

Along the way, we often run into a handful of others that we pass with a smile or a wave, but after meeting them time and again, we think of them as “the usual suspects.”

A few weeks ago, Carol Pavlik wrote in this paper about her attempt to adopt a cat, only to be thwarted by a woman sitting behind a desk who peppered her with stern questions. What was her policy on declawing? Did she have a vet? What would the cat be fed? She answered carefully and thoughtfully, because she had “nothing but good intentions for our hypothetical kitty!”

The Florida man who told police he couldn’t be arrested for drinking and driving because he only gulped his bourbon at stop signs.

The Florida man who stole a Walmart mobility scooter so he could drive his date to a sports bar.

The Florida man who fast-tracked an effective vaccine against Covid, but then told America to inject bleach into their veins instead.

When my friend Carol and I met him in early March, he told us he had just celebrated the 36th anniversary “of the day that put me in this chair.”

“Celebrated” might seem an unusual word to describe the accident that broke his neck, fractured his skull, and confined him to a wheelchair, permanently robbed of the ability to move any part of his body below the neck.

No, it’s that when she talks to her 16-year-old granddaughter, she’s astounded at how Ella’s modern-day Catholic upbringing is so different from her own old-school Catholic upbringing.

Mary DeVoto, a Mother McAuley High School teacher of 41 years, was fired for violating a zero-tolerance rule of ever speaking a word that I assume I can’t print here for the same reason. (I won’t test that theory and put my editor in the uncomfortable position of deleting the word — or its writer — from this publication.)

Don’t believe it! And fight like hell against anybody who would say otherwise. If you don’t fight like hell, there’s no telling how many other years the progressive Demon-crats will try to steal from us!

Then, as an afterthought, He yanked out a rib from the man and created woman. I have no idea how that in any way explains the way that women are, but then who understands women anyway? Many have tried, but every time men think deeply about women, they get dirty thoughts. I blame God.

As a further afterthought — or maybe as a way to escape blame — God gave man and woman free will.

My son and daughter, of course, and old friends like Bill and Mike with whom I worked for more than 30 years. And Alejandra and Margaret, loving stroke caregivers I haven’t seen since my wife died almost four years ago.

With each “Happy Thanksgiving” I attached an emoji of a fat Thanksgiving turkey — until I got to my friend Hans, who is vegan.

Sure, it has something to do with ripping off that smothering facemask, but it has to do with way more than that. It has to do with watching more and more of our friends, family and neighbors get life-saving vaccines, and then boosters. It has to do with watching covid infections, hospitalizations and death rate rates plummet as a result.

It can also be heartbreaking.

That’s the way I have felt recently when memories of my nephew, Ricky, pop to mind. Ricky died in late September of an opioid overdose—just one of more than 40,000 Americans in the past year to meet that fate. He was 40 years old.

Opioid medications boomed twenty years ago, as pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients were unlikely to become addicted to the drugs to alleviate pain.

That’s why it’s important for principled columnists—like me—to go that extra mile to keep your world expanded beyond the narrow bounds of your lockdown life, to keep you up-to-date firsthand on things that don’t sit just outside your window in Huntley.

It was fun to see the Festival back in fine form — deep fried catfish and country-blues bands in the beer garden of the Rustic Inn, mud volleyball out behind the Route 66 Bar and Grill, carnival rides and booths in the North Island Park surrounded by the Kankakee River, flea market on Water Street, and more.

It’s not that I think you lack the ability to glance at the date on top of the newspaper you’re holding right now. So please don’t be offended that I brought it up. Judging by letters to the editor, some folks get their knickers in a twist over pretty much anything lately.

I only mention the month because July slipped past me somehow. June, too. Maybe it slipped past you as well. So consider this a “heads up.”

“Hm-m-m,” I said, because as luck would have it, I had chopped wood and carried water just a few minutes earlier on my way out to get the paper off the drive. (Well, I carried a watering can and sprinkled that pumpkin vine at the back of the yard, and I broke up a fallen branch lying on the lawn, so… yeah, close enough.)

Oops, sorry. Sometimes I wax poetic when I doze off.

Anyway, the tapping was so soft I wondered who or what might be gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

When I got there, of course, there was nobody.

“Maybe that woodpecker,” I thought, the pesky critter that came around last summer to bonk his beak on a porch pillar.

I fall into that category. Although I was able to stay virus-free long enough to get the vaccine and become bullet-proof, the pandemic did horrible things to me.

And maybe the worst of all is that Covid drove me to turn on the TV.

Oh, it didn’t happen right away. Early last year, as infection rates slowly crept upward and it became clear that this might be a long, lonely slog ahead of us, I resolved to turn my lockdown time into unforeseen opportunity.

Well, at least not until recently, thanks to that video camera I recently bought, so well-camouflaged that those who are being peeped-upon don’t have a clue that I’m watching them.

I’ll get to that, but first a bit of background.

The term “Peeping Tom” dates back almost a thousand years, to a time when a lady named Godiva married a greedy ruler named Leofric in 1040, and urged him to reduce the severe taxes that he had levied on the poor townspeople of Coventry, England.

I have been a big fan of Nana’s Hot Dogs since they opened on Irving Park Road in Streamwood in 1973, the year I moved to nearby Schaumburg.